Women Fight Back Through Art

PARIS — While Paris fashion week's buzz is building, on the same day Karl Lagerfeld'sopening his own photography show, another exhibit is opening, one equally worthy of attention- albeit of a different kind.

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In the Entrepôt, a trendy cultural center on the Left Bank, New-York born painter, Franco-American Betsy Castelman Damez is showing a series of portraits of women victims of violence, who decided to fight back and seek aid at the headquarters of France's most famous women's defense organizations, Ni Putes, Ni Soumises (`neither slut nor submissive'). Indeed, far from the glitter lies the danger of the suburbs, the notorious `banlieues' which enclose the city of lights.

The French association, created by North African migrant women, was initially set up to help female victims of violence and sexist injustice, with a special focus on the banlieues. Recent research shows 30 percent of women aged between 18 and 21 in the Seine Saint Denis (one of Paris' largest and most cut-throat suburbs), have suffered from extreme violence in their own homes in the last past 12 months.

Painting by Betsy Castelman Damez

Approximately 140 women are murdered by their spouses each year in France, that's one woman every three days. Now Ni Putes ni Soumises is the leader in its genre and its founder, Fadela Amara, has been recruited into Sarkozy's government.

Ms. Damez explains:. "It all started when my friend Wassila Ltaief, the association's lawyer, pondered the possibility of bringing an artistic approach to the association. I then offered to do portraits of the women who come to them for help, knowing intuitively these were women of character and that the experience would be positive"

Ms Castleman set up a make-shift studio in the offices situated in a rough area of Paris, "This is where I met these incredible women; after what they had been through, just making that first phone call was so brave. The legal office was teaching them to fight back and that is the process I was painting."

There, she produced 15 larger than life-size portraits of different women, each with a different story, quite the departure from Ms Castelman's better-known landscapes and semi-abstract mythological scenes. For the first time, her work is rooted in daily reality.

"The women didn't quite know why I wanted to paint them at first. Some spoke a lot, others very little. We talked about our daily lives, about work, our children", she said, "This turned into a confidence-building exercise. Some started to dress up for the sessions and apply make-up, really getting into the whole process. My admiration grew for them session by session and they saw themselves through my eyes. I really fell for them too, they are so admirable and the experience became empowering for both of us. "

One of the portraits shows Lubna Hossein from Sudan, who rose to fame when she refused to submit to the 40 lashes she was sentenced to by the local Shari'ah court for wearing trousers in Khartoum. She insisted on a full-length portrait to show herself clad in the incriminated pants. Countering the stereotypical images in so much press photography, Ms Castleman has set out to paint these women not as victims of unspeakable violence, but true heroes fighting back, "That's what art can be about too" muses the painter.

The exhibition `Portraits de Femmes', opens on Wednesday, September 15th, at L'entrepôt, 7/9 rue Francis de Pressensé 75014 Paris